Sobering Up on AI Progress w/ Dr. Sean McGregor

Sean McGregor and I discuss about why evaluating AI systems has become so difficult; we cover everything from the breakdown of benchmarking, how incentives shape safety work, and what approaches like BenchRisk (his recent paper at NeurIPS) and AI auditing aim to fix as systems move into the real world. We also talk about his history and journey in AI safety, including his PhD on ML for public policy, how he started the AI Incident Database, and what he's working on now: AVERI, a non-profit for frontier model auditing.

Chapters

(00:00) - Intro

(02:36) - What's broken about benchmarking

(03:41) - Sean’s wild PhD

(14:28) - The phantom internship

(19:25) - Sean's journey

(22:25) - Market-vs-regulatory modes and AIID

(32:13) - Drunk on AI progress

(38:34) - BenchRisk

(43:20) - Moral hazards and Master Hand

(50:34) - Liability, Section 230, and open source